The Power BI Team is excited to launch a new blog series that highlights notable ISVs who have integrated Power BI Embedded into their applications.

Nintex, a Microsoft ISV partner, creates point-and-click workflow automation software to tackle everything from basic business functions to company-wide processes with a few clicks – not code. Nintex recently released an analytics product, Nintex Hawkeye, built with Power BI Embedded, to offer workflow analytics to their customers. We caught up with Luke Bongiorno, Senior Product Manager at Nintex engineering, to talk about analytics and what it means in the world of workflow.

Luke: One of the guiding principles of Nintex Hawkeye is beautiful communication. This is more than just aesthetics. Communicating verbose and complex data must be done in a way that is easy to consume. At Nintex, we are the world’s premier workflow automation provider. Building a world-class data visualization platform was not our core competency, so we chose to leverage a best-in-breed data analytics and visualization solution so that we could accelerate our time to market.

Nintex has been a key Microsoft partner for many years. There was a great deal of strategic and engineering synergy in choosing to use Power BI. We benefit from a strong Power BI ecosystem.

Saptarshi:How has adding Nintex Hawkeye with Power BI Embedded to your Workflow solutions changed the way your customers can work with their data and information?

Luke: Our customers now have an unprecedented view into their process portfolio, enabling them to provide visibility, intelligence, and achieve desired outcomes on all process that have been orchestrated with Nintex.

For example, Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, a local government in New Zealand was able to use Nintex Hawkeye to process three years of workflow data, going back to when they became a customer in 2013. They found that the average time to respond to tasks was reduced from three days to one day after Nintex was implemented. This insight shows them people are using and getting value from the technology they’ve invested in. That’s always important, to ensure that technology investments are paying off and they are not shelf-ware. They were able to use this information to establish ROI from their process investments, visualize it with Power BI, and share it with stakeholders.

Saptarshi: Is it important for your customers to be able to execute analytics on their data and information?

Luke: We see analytics helping our customers in several areas. Among them: A. Visibility They can provide systematic visualizations to stakeholders illustrating the impact workflow has had on operations. Nintex Hawkeye provides key consumption and user participation metrics helping illustrate ROI and communicate with LOB groups. B. Intelligence Our customers are able to understand and fine tune the workflows they have in place, where they are located, and how often they are used. This intelligence will help them measure business process performance and track accountability. C. Impact With this insight, they can understand what is happening in their workflow practice, prevent, or, diagnose and fix problems.

Saptarshi: Why is data visualization helpful for your customers?Luke :These visualizations serve as a common language to help communicate the impact the investments made in process automation has had on the organization. By visualizing their data, our customers are able to understand the size and scale of their process portfolio, have conversations, and make informed decisions around those processes.

For example, Hawke’s Bay is able to track the number of workflow publishers and participants over time and create reports from this information. The visualizations they create in Power BI are used with the Council’s leadership to illustrate success. It’s data driven, concrete, and can’t be disputed. It’s a great vehicle to show the impact of the IT team on the business.

Saptarshi: How difficult was it to add Power BI Embedded to your Nintex Hawkeye Workflow solutions?

Luke: Power BI Embedded allows us to decouple our visualization and analytical capabilities from our core engineering effort. This means we have a cross-functional team from our Product Management, User Experience, and User Assistance all contributing to our Power BI Embedded visualizations and delivering them to our customers as soon as they are ready.

Integrating Power BI Embedded was extremely fast and easy. We were able to take our existing investments in the Power BI ecosystem and seamlessly integrate into our app within days, not months.

Saptarshi: What other benefits is Nintex finding through Power BI Embedded?

Luke: Our Partners drive our business and are critical to our success. Data visualization is an exciting component of technology that many end users want, but is hard to deliver. By putting Power BI Embedded in Nintex Hawkeye, we make it easy for our Partners to provide this highly desired capability, helping them have value-based conversations about process optimization with their customers as well as with new parts of the business. Having Power BI Embedded in Nintex Hawkeye is a big advantage for our Partners. Nintex Partners are experts in SharePoint, Office 365, Workflow and Forms. But most are not BI experts. Everybody recognizes that BI and analytics are a huge competitive advantage. You’ve got to have it as a competency. It’s a given. But, the problem is… …BI is “hard.” Extracting, processing, and communicating information from data is… …hard.

When we built Nintex Hawkeye, we wanted to make it easy for our Partners to help their customers focus on the value their process investments bring and create a strategy for continuous improvement. We wanted to find a way to make the visualization and communication piece as easy as possible. Power BI Embedded was the answer for us. For more information on Nintex, visit our website.

Saptarshi :Thank you Luke for this helpful discussion.

Please stay tuned for additional Power BI Embedded implementation story posts coming your way this month and through December.